In the present business environment, corporations are demanding more real time information to make sound and time-critical business decisions. Business Intelligence (BI) has been used to support and improve such business enterprise decision making. BI tools are commonly applied to business data, such as sales revenue, costs, income, or other financial data. These tools are designed to spot, retrieve and analyze business data and to provide various historical, current and predictive future views of business operations. Common functions of BI tools include reporting, data exploration, data mining, data cleansing, information management, and business performance management.
In particular, reporting is a common function of BI tools. A report typically refers to information that is automatically retrieved from an information source (e.g., data warehouse, database, repository, etc.) and formatted according to a predefined schema. A report is a powerful way to present information. It facilitates compilation of massive amounts of data and monitoring of various enterprise operations. In addition, reports may be used to support the enterprise decision-making process in many areas, such as in sales, marketing, management, budgeting or forecasting.
There are, however, some limitations in present BI systems. One limitation is the complexity of the available tools and environment used for designing professional reports. Such tools require expert knowledge and are often too complex for a typical business user to learn. This often leads to lower productivity in developing reports and incomplete capturing of valuable data in the resulting report.
Another problem is the lack of integration of BI systems with the business process. For example, a user may be using an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to perform work tasks or manage resources. While doing so, he may wish to view certain reports that can be generated by the BI tools to facilitate his work process. However, such BI tools are typically not integrated with the ERP software or the business process. More importantly, the source data retrievable by BI tools is typically not from the same information source as the source data retrievable by ERP software. Moreover, the relationship between the two types of source data is typically not defined. In order to view such reports, the user must switch from the ERP software to another different application to activate the BI tools. This causes much inconvenience and isolates the business process from the business intelligence platform.
Yet another limitation is the passive nature of the search and knowledge retrieval process in conventional BI systems. Ideally, users should be experienced with the creation and content of existing reports, so that they can easily find the report relevant to their work task. However, in current systems, users have to manually select the relevant report from a long list presented to them. As a result, work productivity and efficiency are typically impaired.
Accordingly, there is a need to provide an improved business intelligence platform that is more automated and integrated with the business process.